bike culture blogged

Tl;DR Lance Armstrong

Post Doprah that played out like a group therapy session for Lance, where the most important thing we learned is he didn’t call Betsy Fat, most fans are ready to move on. We’ve said our piece and so have others in every editorial page from both coasts to the fly over states.

Of concern with meh statements like this from Trek, is if the industry is aware that the sport is on the brink. Do they just think a new model year will make it all go away? A ball sports fan said to me yesterday, “So pissed about Lance cause he made me care about cycling! F’ing cycling, I would never cared about it if not for that liar and most certainly don’t now!”

Back to the marginalia of the sporting world we go, with hour-long recaps of races by announcers that don’t know shit about it. When a simple PR angle gets handed to you – it was a personal failure and not an industry problem, then you use it. Not like anyone but Lance participated in the doping or funded it with sponsorship dollars. The sport propelled a hero into the highest orbit of celebrity and then dropped him to the bottom of late-night comedian jokes.

I said on the Spokesmen this weekend, a cycling podcast, that this isn’t just going to go away with new carbon layup schedules or hydraulic disc brakes. It’s endemic to the sport and industry. The next time one of the corrupt generation says, Win On Sunday, Sell on Monday respond with “is that why you enabled a generation of dopers, then?”

That how it works?

Before Doprah aired, I said on Medium, previously people at Rapha made the Lance myth, “Do better next time with Wiggo, ‘mmmkay?”